Keap vs Salesforce: Expensive Per Account Against Expensive Per Seat

One of these is the most expensive CRM in this category per seat, and the other is the most expensive per account. They lose to each other in opposite ways, and a buyer weighing them is usually asking the wrong question, which is which one is cheaper. The better question is which kind of expense you can live with.

OUR TAKE: Salesforce costs more as you grow and does more as you grow. Keap costs the same as you grow and stops doing more almost immediately. For a business under about twenty people that needs marketing automation and payments more than it needs pipeline sophistication, Keap wins on scope and loses on everything to do with the contract. Above that size, or anywhere a forecast has to survive a board meeting, the argument for Keap evaporates.

## The prices, which are not comparable until you fix a headcount

Keap prices the account. Salesforce prices the seat, and its ladder spans a factor of twenty-two.

Monthly cost in dollars, annual billing	Keap entry plan	Salesforce Starter Suite	Salesforce Pro Suite	Salesforce Core
2 users	249	50	200	390
5 users	345	125	500	975
10 users	505	250	1,000	1,950
20 users	825	500	2,000	3,900

Salesforce's figures are $25 for the starter suite, $100 for the pro suite and $195 for the core tier, per seat per month on annual billing. Keap's are the entry plan at $249 a month plus licences beyond two at three hundred and eighty-four dollars a year, which is thirty-two a month^[2].

Keap is dearer than the starter suite at every headcount here. It passes the pro suite at around three users and is already below the core tier at two. Note how fast the Salesforce columns climb: twenty people on the core tier is thirty-nine hundred dollars a month, which is 4.7 times Keap at the same headcount.

## The ladders, which fail in mirror images

Salesforce's problem is the jump. We measured the step from the suite products into Sales Cloud proper at 7.8 times the price, with the full ladder spanning twenty-two times from bottom to top. A buyer who starts on the starter suite and needs real Sales Cloud functionality is not upgrading; they are buying a different product at a different price.

Keap's problem is the ceiling. There is no jump because there is nothing above: three plans, differing only in contacts, user licences and prebuilt automations, with every feature present on all three^[2]. That is honest and it is also final. If the product cannot do something on the entry plan, no amount of money makes it do that thing.

Which failure you prefer depends on what you expect to need in three years. Salesforce can grow into almost anything, expensively. Keap cannot grow into anything at all, at a flat price.

Scope, which is where Keap earns its place

This is the comparison most favourable to Keap, and it is real. Out of the box, Keap includes marketing automation, broadcast and one-to-one email, text messaging with a dedicated business line, landing pages, forms, quotes, invoices, recurring billing, a checkout with order bumps and promotion codes, a native payment processor and an appointment scheduler^[2].

Assembling that around Salesforce means Marketing Cloud or a third-party marketing platform, a payments integration, a scheduling tool and usually a consultant to hold them together. The Salesforce column in the table above buys a CRM. The Keap column buys most of a business's operating software.

Where Salesforce is simply better: pipeline and forecasting depth, reporting, territory and quota management, permissions at scale, and an integration ecosystem that has no equal in this category. Keap's marketplace carries 88 applications against 255 experts^[13], and that ratio is the honest summary of its ecosystem.

## Both of them charge you to get started, differently

Salesforce's implementation cost is usually a partner's invoice rather than a line on the vendor's price list, which makes it variable and hard to compare. Keap's is a line item: a thousand, two thousand or three thousand dollars in the catalogue, matched by name to the three plans, with a single promotional five hundred shown on the implementation page^[2][3]. The vendor calls the package required and explains why in its own pricing FAQ.

The difference matters in a specific way. With Keap you can price the first year exactly: twelve months plus one catalogue item. With Salesforce you cannot, and the range is wide.

The contract, where Keap is the worst in the category

We would be failing a reader not to put this plainly. Keap's billing policy states that cancellations must be initiated verbally through a Keap representative and that emailed cancellation requests are not acceptable, with ten days' notice required before the billing date^[4]. The governing agreement, reached by a redirect from Keap's own terms address, asks for thirty days, makes termination effective at the expiry of the next period, confines refunds to three days from purchase, permits fee increases at renewal, and allows the vendor to hold account data for up to thirteen months after termination or to delete it immediately at its discretion^[5][6].

Salesforce's enterprise agreements are not generous, and we have criticised them. They do not require a telephone call to end.

## Two operational rules worth knowing before you compare anything else

Keap's contact allowance moves in one direction by itself. Exceeding it raises your subscription at the next billing date automatically; deleting contacts does not reverse it, because in the vendor's words Keap will not remove additional contacts from your subscription automatically^[8].

And a contact with no open, click or form submission for six months becomes non-marketable, cannot receive broadcast or automation email, and cannot be reactivated by the customer on any edition^[7]. Whether such contacts still count toward the allowance you are billed on is not published anywhere we could find. For a business with a long purchase cycle, that is the question to settle before the comparison with Salesforce even starts.

Support, where Keap does better than its reputation

This surprised us, so we checked it twice.

Keap publishes United States phone support Monday to Friday from six in the morning to six in the evening Mountain time, chat around the clock inside the application, and a named Customer Success Manager on every plan^[11]. Twelve hours a day on the telephone is a stronger published offer than most vendors in this category make, and the review evidence agrees: support appears in 63% of Keap's four and five-star reviews against 42% of its one and two-star ones, and the positive ones name a person and describe a problem that got fixed^[14].

Two deductions. The success manager carries no obligation, response time or service level in the governing agreement, so it is a marketing commitment rather than a contractual one^[6]. And the same telephone line is the only way to close the account, which is a different thing from support being simply good.

Salesforce's support is tiered and priced, and at the entry tiers it is thinner than what Keap includes. At the top it is better. That is the pattern of this entire comparison.

## Migration, in both directions

Getting data into Keap has a price list: a basic import at a hundred and ninety-nine dollars, an advanced one at nine hundred and ninety-nine, an e-commerce one at one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, hourly data work at a hundred and fifty^[2]. If your records are not a clean spreadsheet, price this before signing.

Getting data out is better than we expected, with caveats. A free self-service contact export is documented^[9]. Notes and tags are not included in it, which matters because the segmentation a Keap account runs on lives in tags. The download link is valid for twenty-four hours. And an account unable to send marketing or transactional email may also be prevented from receiving its export download link, which puts the accounts most likely to be leaving in the worst position to collect their data.

The catalogue separately prices paid exports: three hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a data export, nine hundred and ninety-nine for email history, five hundred and ninety-nine for file attachments^[2]. None of those prices appears on a customer-facing page.

Salesforce's export tooling is self-service, complete and free. On this axis there is no contest.

Integration surface, measured rather than asserted

Keap's marketplace carries 88 applications against 255 experts, counted with the vendor's own tab filters^[13]. Salesforce's AppExchange has no rival in this category and is one of the reasons large organisations choose it.

Keap's API is better than its marketplace: fifteen hundred calls a minute and a hundred and fifty thousand a day per key and secret pair, ten a second for a personal access token, a per-application ceiling of ten thousand a minute introduced in June 2026, a documented spike allowance of twenty-five calls a second, and a 429 on breach with retry guidance^[10]. What is missing is a per-plan monthly entitlement, published nowhere, while the catalogue sells five hundred thousand calls a month for two hundred dollars.

So Keap can be integrated. It simply has fewer things waiting to be integrated with.

## The scores, and why

Keap takes 2.74 on our scale and Salesforce 3.28. Keap's capability mark is the higher of the two on breadth; its value mark is the lowest we have given any CRM. Salesforce's score is held down by its own ladder and by the $25 seat price that turns out to apply only in a narrow sense.

On sentiment, Keap's platforms disagree by three points: Trustpilot displays 1.1 from 498 reviews while that platform's own distribution table averages 3.9, a difference produced by recency weighting rather than by opinion^[14]. One Gartner Digital Markets pool gives 4.1 from 1,299 reviews across three properties^[15].

Choose Keap if

You are under twenty people, you sell something transactional, and you would otherwise buy a CRM plus a marketing platform plus a payment integration plus a scheduler. You want one invoice and one place to look. You can price a first year exactly and you accept the exit terms with your eyes open.

Choose Salesforce if

You expect to grow past the point where Keap stops adding anything, which happens at the entry plan. You need forecasting, reporting or permissions that survive scrutiny. You already have marketing software you like. Or you want the option of ending a contract in writing.

The three-year view, which is the only fair one

Neither of these is a one-year decision. Both carry migration costs going in and friction coming out, so a three-year frame is the honest comparison.

Take five users. Keap's entry plan on annual billing is four thousand one hundred and forty dollars a year, plus a thousand once for implementation, which is thirteen thousand four hundred and twenty over three years. Salesforce's pro suite at $100 a seat is six thousand a year, or eighteen thousand over three, before any partner work. The core tier at $195 is eleven thousand seven hundred a year, or thirty-five thousand one hundred.

So Keap is the cheaper three-year number against both real Salesforce tiers at this headcount. Now the part the number hides.

Over three years Salesforce can absorb a change in your business. New teams, new processes, a reporting demand from an investor, a second product line: the platform stretches, and you pay for the stretch. Keap cannot stretch. Over the same three years it does exactly what it did on day one, for the same money, and if the business changes shape you are migrating rather than upgrading.

That is the trade in one sentence. Keap is cheaper and finished; Salesforce is dearer and open.

## Three questions to ask before choosing either

What do I need this to do in year three that it cannot do today? If the answer is anything at all, Keap is the wrong choice, because its plans add no capability above the entry one.

Who configures it? Keap requires an implementation package and says why in its own FAQ. Salesforce usually requires a partner. Neither is a product you switch on, and the difference is that only one of them publishes the price.

How does each contract end? Salesforce's ends in writing. Keap's requires a verbal request through a representative, and the vendor's billing policy states that emailed cancellation requests are not acceptable^[4]. Ask what happens to your data afterwards too: the governing agreement allows up to thirteen months of retention, or immediate deletion at the vendor's discretion^[6].